Pride Month is here, and while the celebrations go on as they always do, this year’s have been shadowed by a wave of trans- and homophobic incidents as well as by a spate of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation coming out of Republican-controlled statehouses. Elements on the right seem bent on forcing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, but unfortunately for them, they’re too late: Whether it’s in the courts or at the polls, they’re unlikely to succeed in the long run.
The spirit of Pride continues, as does the vital place of queer people in American society and culture. And there is no better evidence of that than the current slate of institutional exhibitions by LGBTQ+ artists across the country.
Below are 12 shows we recommend by a variety of artists working in multiple mediums who keep the rainbow flag flying high and proud.
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J. C. Leyendecker
Image Credit: National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, Rhode Island. Courtesy New-York Historical Society. Even if you’ve never heard of J. C. Leyendecker (1874–1951), his work as a commercial artist may seem vaguely familiar to you as part of the popular culture of the early 20th century, especially the Roaring Twenties. Leyendecker’s distinctive designs, like his ads for Arrow Shirt collars, helped to define the image of men for his era (and the producers of the 1973 hit film The Sting certainly knew of him, borrowing his style in posters for the movie). Leyendecker lent his models an air of elegant sophistication and, since he was gay, a homoerotic undertone that went unnoticed by most people who saw his work in newspapers and in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post (for which he shared cover art duties with Norman Rockwell). With “Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity,” the New-York Historical Society resurfaces Leyendecker’s work and its stealthy influence on an unaware public. Through August 13.
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Jacolby Satterwhite
Image Credit: Courtesy Dusty Kessler. Multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986) explores queerness (his own as well as in the general sense) through performance; sculpture; digital photography; and immersive, elaborately choreographed computer animations inspired by gaming, voguing, and the music videos of Janet Jackson, Dee Lite, Björk, the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Michael Jackson, and Madonna that he watched as a kid. Satterwhite also references art history (as in a neon-signage reimagining of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe), but it is his mother in particular who plays an outsize role as a touchstone in his work. A diagnosed schizophrenic, Patricia Satterwhite prodigiously produced drawings that covered her interests, which included consumer culture, medicine, fashion, Surrealism, mathematics, sex, philosophy, astrology, and genealogy. Satterwhite incorporates her work into his own and brings other aspects of her identity into his performative practice. “Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, is his first major institutional survey. Through August 13.
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Darrel Ellis
Image Credit: Baltimore Museum of Art. Copyright © Darrel Ellis Estate and Candice Madey, New York. Courtesy the Bronx Museum. An acquaintance of Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar—both of whom photographed him—Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) was an artist of memory whose work reflected a family history ruptured by tragedy: Before Ellis was born, his father, Thomas, was beaten to death by a drunken plainclothes policeman. Ellis grew up gay with a hostile stepdad in the Bronx as the borough reached its 1970s nadir. But Thomas had been an avid shutterbug, and it was by appropriating his father’s photographs that Ellis found a way to reconnect to his past. At first he based elegiac drawings on them; later he projected them onto topographical backdrops constructed out of cardboard, foam, and plaster before rephotographing them. His work was similar to that of the Pictures Generation, his coevals, though Ellis’s combination of wistfulness and distortion and his consideration of race, class, and queer identity sharply distinguished him from Cindy Sherman and her cohort. “Darrel Ellis: Regeneration,” at the Bronx Museum, New York, brings his work back to the neighborhood that inspired it. Through September 10.
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Bernice Bing
Image Credit: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Copyright © Estate of Bernice Bing. Image: Kevin Candland, copyright © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. At the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, “Into View: Bernice Bing,” revisits the work of a little-known figure in the San Francisco Bay Area’s avant-garde milieu during the 1960s and ’70s. Of Chinese heritage, gay, and Beat Generation–adjacent, Bernice Bing (1936–1998) was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She never knew her father, and her mother, who worked at a local nightclub, died when she was five, leaving Bing and her little sister in the care of an orphanage. Bing’s subsequent experiences with the foster-home system were unhappy, and she was frequently abused. But she evinced considerable artistic ability and would eventually study with West Coast abstractionist Richard Diebenkorn and Japanese artist Saburo Hasegawa, who familiarized her with Zen Buddhism. Hasegawa also introduced Bing to calligraphy, which would greatly influence her lyrically gestural canvases. Additionally, Bing painted portraits and scenes of Northern California’s landscape, all of which has been brought back in this long-overdue revival. Through June 26.
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P. Staff
Image Credit: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel. Known for multimedia installations, British artist P. Staff (b. 1987) offers a trans perspective on the often deleterious “biopolitics” surrounding the intersections of bodies, ecosystems, and institutions, with literature playing a key role. In the video installation Weed Killer, a meditation on the thin line between medicine and poison, they reference lesbian artist Catherine Lord’s memoir about the adverse effects of the chemotherapy she underwent for cancer. With On Venus, corrosion becomes a metaphor for anti-trans sentiment with a poem about the earth’s hellishly uninhabitable neighbor accompanied by images of its transit across the sun—part of a larger installation that includes ceiling pipes leaking acid in a yellow-lit space. In another room, photo-etchings of tabloid headlines relay the completely fabricated story of a male child murderer claiming to be a woman to avoid incarceration in a men’s prison. Staff continues to explore their concerns with two new installations, for the Basel Kunsthalle and Barcelona’s Fundació Joan Miró, on view this summer. “In Ekstase,” Kunsthalle Basel, through September 10; “Fixations per Minute,” Fundació Joan Miró, through September 7.
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Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Image Credit: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel. Tiona Nekkia McClodden (b. 1981) is something of a triple threat: a writer, a curator, and an artist whose practice encompasses film, installation, painting, and sculpture. She is just as diverse in terms of her identity: In addition to being a Black queer woman, she was diagnosed with autism in 2019. Although she’d had symptoms such as confrontational behavior, periods of being nonverbal, and feeling overwhelmed by external stimuli, she resisted the idea of being on the spectrum at first but eventually accepted it, embracing autism as part of her exploration of intersectionality. As she told the New York Times, dealing with “a constant state of discomfort” means that her work “has to be uncomfortable.” To that effect, she infuses her output—which has included vacuum-formed reliefs of firearms, large sculptures resembling traps, and chain-mail masks—with violent undertones and references to BDSM. Those qualities remain evident in McClodden’s Kunsthalle Basel exhibition, “The Poetics of Beauty Will Inevitably Resort to the Most Base Pleadings and Other Wiles in Order to Secure Its Release,” her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Through August 13.
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Wolfgang Tillmans
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and Maureen Paley, London. The photographs of Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) have always possessed an uncanny ability to make everyday, random subjects seem wondrously alive, as if one were seeing them for the very first time. “The viewer . . . should enter my work through their own eyes and their own lives,” Tillmans has said, and in a career spanning more that 30 years, he’s provided ample opportunity for us to do so, with an eclectic array of styles and techniques that range across camera-less abstractions, formal studies, and snapshot-like images of friends. His installations are just as varied, with photographs presented singly in proper frames or pinned unframed in unruly salon-style groupings. No subject escapes his lens, be it a still life, an astronomical phenomenon, or a nightclub. Queer subjects—men kissing, a man in an airplane seat with his cock out—also appear in his work, the vastness of which is revisited in “Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear,” a retrospective now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Through October 1.
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Martin Wong
Image Credit: Copyright © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W, New York. Before it became gentrified, New York’s East Village was home to a vibrant art scene that welcomed artists from all over the country and the world during the 1980s. One of them was Martin Wong (1946–1999), who hailed from San Francisco’s Chinatown. He came to NYC in 1978 and settled on the Lower East Side, a ramshackle neighborhood of dilapidated and abandoned tenements and storefronts. But it afforded a Wild West sort of freedom, especially for queer artists like Wong, who transformed scenes of urban decay into visionary landscapes where nighttime views of rubble-strewn lots were paired with skies filled with star charts and sign-language hieroglyphics. The Latino community was likewise depicted through a magical realist lens, including men whom Wong framed as objects of homoerotic longing. Such works have been collected in “Malicious Mischief,” a career survey of Wong’s art spanning the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, now at the Camden Art Centre, London. Through September 17.
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rafa esparza
Image Credit: Filip Wolak, courtesy Artists Space, New York. Los Angeles artist rafa esparza (b. 1981) explores the junction between Latino and queer identity through site-specific performances and installations. In Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022–23), for instance, esparza transformed himself into a chimerical amalgam of cyborg, bicycle, and coin-operated kiddie ride whose brilliant metal-flake paint scheme recalled the Chicano low-rider car culture of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Deconstructing that hyper-masculine milieu, Corpo RanfLA also allegorized the brown body as economic instrument, a conveyance for an exploitive system of cheap labor. Automobiles also factor into “Camino,” esparza’s show at Artists Space, New York, which deals with the construction of Los Angeles’s 110 Freeway, the first in America. The road plowed through the city’s main Latino neighborhood as part of a national program of dividing and isolating communities of color with highways. Reprising that strategy in microcosm, Esparza’s installation surrounds sections of a rubble-strewn, adobe-paved “road” with portraits of barefooted people of color. Through August 19.
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Keith Haring
Image Credit: Copyright © Keith Haring Foundation. Image: Douglas M. Parker Studio, Los Angeles, courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation. Keith Haring’s combinations of hieroglyphics and coloring-book outlines made him a star in 1980s New York City, where he started out as a street artist before becoming one of the defining figures of the period. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring (1958–1990) came to New York in 1978, when cheap rents enabled a vibrant cultural synergy between uptown and downtown. Hip-hop was spreading from its Bronx birthplace into the mainstream, and with it, graffiti, which Haring took up. Haring made his mark in the subways, rendering chalk drawings on the sheets of black paper that the transit authority would temporarily put up in stations as placeholders between ads. There Haring developed an iconic symbology, which included his “radiant baby.” These images and others like them would define the work that made him a household name. His astonishing career, equally brief and prolific, is recalled in “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody,” a retrospective at L.A.’s Broad Museum. Through October 8.
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Lyle Ashton Harris
Image Credit: Copyright © Lyle Ashton Harris. Image courtesy of the artist and LGDR, New York. For some 35 years, Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965) has been exploring the impact of social and cultural hierarchies on identity, including his own as a queer artist of color. “Lyle Ashton Harris: Our First and Last Love,” a compact career survey at Brandeis University’s Rose Museum, is titled after the message Harris found in a Chinese fortune cookie back in 1993. He’s kept it ever since, and the original is included here, taped into a journal exhibited alongside other ephemera. The phrase is also reprised in a neon piece featuring cursive red lettering set in a black frame. Other notable items include mixed-media collages, some of which are mounted against panels of brightly patterned West African fabric. The imagery they contain is an eclectic blend of postcards, clippings, pages from magazines, and photos, including family snapshots that, like the show itself, present the full range of Harris’s interests from the personal to the political. Through July 2.
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Lauren Halsey
Image Credit: ©Lauren Halsey/Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York/Photo Hyla Skopitz/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art The trend of Black artists and intellectuals claiming ancient Egypt as an African civilization has been in the news lately, with modern Egyptian authorities decrying such efforts (like a recent Cleopatra biopic starring a Black actress) as historically inaccurate. That hasn’t prevented Lauren Halsey (b. 1987), a gay African American from South Central L.A., from building an homage to her hometown in the form of an Egyptian temple atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ancient Egyptian iconography has long been a staple of Afrofuturist aesthetics—found, for instance, in the music of Sun Ra and Parliament/Funkadelic—one of the inspirations for Halsey’s piece. The other was the Met’s famous Temple of Dendur. Made of concrete and large enough to walk through, Halsey’s structure comes complete with columns and sphinxes featuring the faces of friends and family, and walls inscribed with phrases and images evoking the world of Black urban neighborhoods. Through October 22.